


Manchester

by orphan_account



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Femslash, challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-06-22
Updated: 2004-06-22
Packaged: 2017-10-11 18:02:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/115300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: AU AtS 5.23. Goes AU after Buffy 5.22--basically the challenge was to pair Faith/Illyria in my hometown with no BtVS season six or seven.<br/>Rating: PG-13<br/>Author Notes: darling_effect and stumbelina are to be worshipped by all.<br/>Disclaimer: No businesses were harmed in the writing of this story</p>
            </blockquote>





	Manchester

It's loud and dirty. Damn, she thinks, where are all the Wesleys? Do they make them just for export?

And then she put that thought away.

It's dirty and loud. She was freaked, at first. This picture postcard England that she had in her mind is not appearing before her. She walks down through the centre of the city, Stacked with buses and taxis and bikes and barrow boys and people walking, slowly. No-one seems to be in much of a hurry but they walk steadily, braced against the wind that whips down the main street. It seems to be the main street, Market Street it's called, but everything's higgledy-piggledy and there's another road called High Street and another one called Main. No weather, a blank grey sky. A small sky pierced by mill chimneys and high-rise flats--a contradiction in terms that amuses no-one but her.

Out of nowhere it begins to rain, drizzle this one is called. She's not been here long enough to learn all the names but she's getting them. There's drizzle, which is a fine, light rain that you barely feel until your clothes hang sodden. There's mizzle, which is lighter still, like a thick mist, which makes you think you're sweating except for the cold. There's showers, cloudburst, downpours, torrents, buckets, God's tears, pissing it down, persisting it down, raining cats and dogs, chucking. Chucking it down seems to be the most common type. Uneven bursts of water, like being pelted by some mischievous monkey.

That's another thing they say here, 'Ey up chuck, it's real brass monkeys out there'. It means cold, but it's always cold so she didn't understand. First time someone said that to her she fell out laughing in their face, couldn't help it. Flat voices that roll up and down through sentences, talking in riddles, the other half of proverbs and the words all beginning and ending in the wrong places.

It feels low and battened down somehow. A city built in ditches and hollows. Everything is turned outside in; the people here wear their hearts hidden. She likes that. This place reminds her more of home than California did, despite the foreign sounds and funky smells. Listen hard and it's not so different.

Distracted, she almost misses the place. She hooks a right just in time and comes up against a wall of marble and polished granite. This has to be it. Man, talk about rulebound, every damn Wolfram&Hart looks practically the same. This one, rising out shiny between red brick warehouses, looks like it just crash-landed. Unidentified Flying Building.

The doors open on their own and she almost freaks until she sees the doorman standing there, head down, hand on door, smiling discreetly. She wants to blink her relief at him but even the doorman has to have signed a contract, right? No fraternity here, not for her. She holds up her head and swaggers to the reception where a blonde girl is waiting for her with a clipboard and shifting uncomfortably in pink mules.

"Um, Miss? Faith, um, no last name?"

"That's my name, or, not as the case may be. You my liaison, princess?"

"Appen no. I have a clipboard." The girl beams at her with a bright enthusiasm. Universal Code for Airhead.

"Cool, whatever. Where's my assignment? Heard it was pretty important. Hauled my ass from the back of beyond for this."

"Right, sorted, I've got this list you see? A schedule, you've to report here. Oh!" With a disproportionately pleased jiggle of her head, the girl ticks something off the list. "Then I'm to introduce myself. Hi. I'm-"

"Gimme that." She snatches the clipboard away, ignoring the outraged squeals and starts to read.

"Now Faith. That's hardly polite." English with German accents cutting through comes from a tall, wiry man who walks down the corridor towards her. "Give Gemma back her clipboard. I spent an hour compiling that for her." As he arrives at the scene he sticks out his hand. "Mathias Behounek. I am pleased to make your acquaintance. I heard that our brothers in Los Angeles had the Slayer on the team but I confess I put it down to bombast."

She looks down at his hand but does not take it. Still staring she says quietly and deliberately, "Outside. Contractor."

"Of course, of course. Freelance professional, I quite understand. Still, you're here now and that's the main thing."

Even cloaked in foreign tones and sanity she recognises that voice.

"What are you, the English Wesley?" she asks before she hears herself.

A small smile smirks in the faces of everyone within earshot and she could have died right there.

"Quite," says Mathias.

She'd been there what, a week? A week and still no word from Angel. No word since the hurried phone call in the middle of the night, telling her to get her ass to Manchester and to stay there. After a few days of mooching she got herself down the office like a good little employee and now? She remained, inside apart from a skoosh to the Memorial Dinner. Memorial, more like testimonial. Giggling office hamsters raising a glass to Fred's ascension. She left early.

She punched bags in the training room of the classy apartment Mathias had put her up in and waited for the call.

Waiting was not her thing. She waited in that cell for near two years until the Council made its move and an extraction squad tried for her. Seemed like Buffy had gone and got herself killed saving the world. She wasn't too clear on the details. First thing she heard of it was six guards coming to relocate her and the head one stumbling. She heard the muttered, 'bollocks' and that was enough to send her flying at them. Set off running and demonstrated her calling to everything in her way.

Ran and didn't stop 'til she got to the parking lot. Well, parking lot now. She had been betting on an office block with a basement apartment and handy sewer access. Seemed Angel had had a little bombing incident he'd failed to mention. It took her twenty minutes to sleuth out the location of the Hyperion. She ran there too to find Angel going twisty crazed, over Cordelia of all people, and Wes just twisted.

He took her in, though he'd no reason too and, once the dust had cleared from that year that didn't make any sense in her head, he invited her to join them. She took a week to say no and then a week to say yes. Eventually they settled on permanent consultant. She tripped off that for a while; got business cards made with no number on them and no name, just a picture of a cross and 'permanent consultant' stamped on the back. Angel took them off her; she still doesn't know why.

he looks out over the canal which here in town is bright and the colour of new leaves. The weird glass porch thing at the side of her building captures reflections and wobbly-green waves back to her. She lets her eyes go slack and her perspective widens to include the street and the action-figure stalking too quickly through oblivious pedestrians.

"This can't be good."

And suddenly the action-figure is springing into action and her French windows and she recognises it the second before her fist connects.

"Illyria."

"Yes."

"Is this the call?"

"The call is not coming. We must leave now."

"Okay," she says, but only because the walls are beginning to shake.

She jogs down the narrow path at the side of the canal following Illyria and mesmerised, despite herself, by the ass in tight leather, rocking back and forth in front of her.

"So what's the script?" she calls ahead to Illyria. "Something big going down?"

The girl-thing stopped still and turned her head slowly, as if it slid up a ramp, to meet her eyes. "Many things have fallen. I find myself grieved and wishing vengeance. You will join me and we shall wreak bloody destruction upon..."

Alarm bells ringing, upon who? she thinks. "Upon who?" she says.

"Everyone who is left."

She cries and hit things, lots. Later, when they sit up on the moors looking down at the city and the column of smoke rising from somewhere near the centre she finally says out loud, "why didn't he call me? Damn, why didn't any of them call me? I could have been there man, could have helped. Could have done something."

"Yes. You are strong for a human and fight rocks well. I do not know why you were not included in their suicide."

"Suicide," she whispers and feels like she is the one who died. She looks at the shell-thing before her, who is peering at her with a mixture of concern and disdain and all she sees is her boys, who loved this thing in every incarnation. And she reaches for the shell and wraps herself in it and they move awkwardly together; hooks of despair catch eyes of anger and they fit.

They begin back in the city. They walk down Canal Street and Illyria doesn't even get a second glance. She pales into frump compared to the extravagant queens that dash up and down between outside tables. Hopping from jettys to cobbled paths; brandishing bottles of Newky Brown and declaiming in that nasal, earthy sound, "Darling, you'll never believe the minger that just had a go!"

She smashes in the door before Illyria can demolish the whole front wall and they step through into offices that look deserted.

"You sure this is the place?"

"It belongs to the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart. Can you not hear their boastful singing? It fills my ears and creeps, throbbing, crowing, through my being."

She shakes her head. "Na-ah. I hear traffic."

"It could be traffic," admits Illyria. "But this is a den of mine enemies."

"Well, it aint now, Blue. Place looks like it's been cleaned out."

They tear down the building just in case and go to the next. This one is out in a suburb called Chorlton-cum-Hardy and she can't help sniggering. Weeping willows rustle at the side of a low half-timbered pub and the drunks, which seems to be everyone here, loll on a green, throwing insults and cider cans at each other. It begins to rain, again, and they crash through another door to find another empty office. This time, filing cabinets lie all messed up and leaning at mad angles but it is vacant, totally.

Sometimes she follows Illyria and sometimes she leads. It is all a matter of necessity. The next place is across meadows that look sunk in water, with a river running even lower through the middle. Sale it's called and under an overpass that just juts out into nothing they find a parking lot with one car left in it and the door of the attendant hut swinging in the wind.

So they move on through council estates and leafy swallowed-villages and places that she would have called the hood at home but has no words for here. They move on in long strides pulling through office blocks and tenements and terraces until the slums turn into favelas and so much water has been crossed. Leather makes stark outlines from soft curves and tears into everything. Everywhere the same thing until they have been through every place.

And at night, they take vengeance on each other.


End file.
